Build Music

This modern street music from Sierra Leone is based on a form of ceremonial Islamic masquerade procession music known as bubu. Janka Nabay fled Sierra Leone in 2003 during the ten-year civil war to the US where he created a new electronic variation of a style that was originally performed on bamboo flutes.

This new interpretation is an odd mishmash of sounds – highly rhythmic with frenetic Casio keyboards and drum programming. It’s brash – his voice is raucous and pretty awful, and the lyrics are banal – but that’s probably the point of it. Some of the tracks have strangely hypnotic psychedelic keyboard. ‘Game Ova’, for example, could have been sampled off the first Pink Floyd LP. Completely bizarre, this is possibly targeted at the same audience that enjoyed the weirdly pedestrian disco-funk of the late Nigerian musician and businessman, William Onyeabor.